Okay, so Hobbitpunk is a thing now. We're doing this.
This started because of... well, you can read it here. But the basic premise is that I love punk and I love cottagecore, but can't seem to find an online community that isn't mostly about “the aesthetic” without practical lifestyle ideas. Look, I love a moodboard as much as the next person, I really do. But I can only handle so many scripted TikTok videos and screenshots from Animal Crossing.
We've all been sitting here pining for a romanticized life that we see in curated media, but the facts of the matter are that most of us can't have that life, not the way things are now. I don't know about you, but I have neither the money nor the skill to go peace out to a farm and live close to nature. It would be a disaster. It would also accomplish absolutely jack for anyone who wasn't me and my husband. I also can't open a bookstore or a tea shop, and I'm WAY too broke to fill my wardrobe with fair trade, sustainably made clothing unless I pick up the needle and do it myself (which... in progress.).
If you're anything like me, you're at best living in a meh apartment that the landlord doesn't take care of, in a city somewhere. You might also be living with family in an environment you can't control, or in a small town where you're literally the only person with your interests. I've done both of these as well, which is why my punk/goth phase waited until I was in my 20s to actually become visible. Heh heh. “Phase.” I'm in my late 30s now.
Anyway. I'm not really proposing an aesthetic. There probably will be one, I can't see this happening without inspiration photos from time to time, but I actually want whatever this is to be a practical lifestyle that everyday doofuses like you and me can do. “Hobbitpunk” is... exactly what it says on the tin. Punk ideals in a hobbity skill set, or vice versa. Tearing down a defunct, bullshit system and replacing it with something wholesome.
The original post included this, as the sort of thing I've been picturing:
Imagine drinking tea while lounging in a room full of mismatched, thrifted furniture that’s comfy as shit, but held together with duct tape. You’re wrapped in a handmade quilt, and reading Karl Marx. There are assorted dumpster dived containers on your windowsill full of herbs and salad greens. You’ll make hot soup for supper, and share it with a half-dozen other freaks who showed up to plan a direct action that will probably involve stolen fireworks. Somebody baked bread to go with the soup, and a friend with a green mohawk and waistcoat covered in patches brought cookies.
From discussions with others, here are some of the ideas.
Ideals: Crafting, anarchy, adventure, home and hearth stuff, homecooked food, radical body acceptance, political activism, books, music, sustainability, feminism, and socialism (or communism, if that's your thing) are good. Transphobia, homophobia, the patriarchy, white supremacy, consumerism, capitalism, abuse, war, and whatever the hell these “Tradwife” folks are doing (I'm still not sure, other than promoting some serious Stockholm Syndrome with your abusers?) are bad.
I'm personally a fan of peace and love, but I do know that sometimes, you gotta swing the frying pan and bash some orcs.
Decor: Your living quarters are probably fine as they are. I'm not telling you to go shopping for this. If you don't like how your place looks now, then keep your eyes open at thrift stores for things like handmade quilts and afghans, good quality cooking tools, and anything that looks cozy and comfy. Don't worry if it matches or not, just make it the sort of place that someone would feel safe in. Books, maps, embroidered pillows, swords, whatever. You do you.
Clothing: Yes, yes, I know there's a “punk uniform” and the Hobbits in the movies had a very specific “look.” We're not cosplaying here. Put down the prosthetic ears. PUT THEM DOWN. Your closet... is probably fine as it is. If you've made it this far in my post, then I imagine you're already kind of halfway there. Dress comfy, and to your tastes. Have fun. You wanna dye your hair purple? Wear a corset and an apron? Combat boots and a wool waistcoat? Go for it.
Just try not to purchase “fast fashion” clothing from WalMart, or wherever. Thrift stores are what I'd recommend. Or learn to sew, and just kind of stay aware of where your fabrics are coming from.
Activities: Learn to make things. Sewing, cooking, woodworking, leatherworking, whatever. Hop onto YouTube and explore. Read books, all of the books. Take care of your neighbors and make sure the people around you are safe. Hunt racists for sport. Steal from the rich (if that's your thing). Rescue animals. Rescue people out of abusive/dangerous situations. Show up to the protests with soup. Find what needs done in your community and do it yourself if you can. Host potlucks and feed people. Go on road trips. Make tea. And beer if you want. Share your skills with the community so others can do the thing too.
If I can pull this off, I'll try to share videos with skills and links to information as I can find it. If y'all find something cool too, please feel free to show it to me. The asks and submissions are open. Do the thing.
Chapter Summary: Gabe and Pertwee get to work, but Alderman's killer returns to the hunt.
Tags: See the Masterpost.
Thank you for reading! If you don’t want to wait a week between chapters, or if you just want to support my work, the text of Chapters 1-12 is available on Kindle. Just click HERE to download them!
If you like this, feel free to reblog. This is how stories spread on Tumblr, it's great for me. Also, feel free to send me an ask if you'd like to be put on a tag list, or if you have a question, or just want to chat!
By the time they had made it to their destination, Pertwee was insisting on a “more civilized” sort of dinner. The two of them had stopped at a dine-in restaurant, and of course neither of them knew it, but it was the same one that Tracey had passed just a few hours beforehand.
Pertwee was skimming the restaurant menu, looking very much relieved that nothing on it involved refried beans or hot sauce. “You know,” he said, sounding almost as if he were speaking to himself, “I don’t believe that this area looks too far removed from Missouri, if you don’t count the distance.”
“It’s not that far away,” Gabe shrugged. It was right in the middle of the evening when they’d stopped, just before the sky actually began to darken. There were enough people in the restaurant that a comforting buzz of chatter drowned out anything further away than the salt shaker. Gabe was reasonably sure that they could say whatever they wanted here, and no one nearby would hear them. Or perhaps they simply wouldn’t care. The white noise of conversation isolated each table as effectively as curtains might have.
Pertwee somehow managed to peer at Gabe over the top rim of his glasses and the top of the menu at the same time, with the air of someone trying hard not to laugh. “We’ve driven nearly the entire width of my home country,” he said. Gabe had to smile at that. “I’ve been in the States for nearly fifteen years, and I don’t believe I’ll ever get used to that.”
“Fair enough,” Gabe chuckled.
A plump woman somewhere in her mid-forties wandered up, all smiles and charm, to bring them drinks and take their orders. Her nametag read “Leila.” Pertwee tried to hide the cautious sip he took from his hot water before dropping a teabag into it. Gabe figured he was checking for coffee grounds. “Now,” Pertwee began with all of the gravitas of an experienced lecturer. “I imagine that our next step is to find a room of some kind. I’m afraid I know very little about missing persons cases, though, so we’re in your area of expertise now.”
Gabe rested his elbows on the wood laminate table, staring into space while he thought. “Well, if I still had a badge I could go to the families of the missing, ask them whatever I could think of. As it is, I’m not sure either.”
The two of them sat in silence for several minutes, watching the crowds of hungry Illinoisans gossiping away over their dinners. White uniform shirts with maroon aprons wove through the throng like bees over flowers, stopping to smile professional smiles and keep drinks filled. There were old pictures on the walls, Gabe saw. Black and white photos of dilapidated farmhouses and barns, blown up to the size of posters, mixed across the walls with advertisements for the upcoming Easter luncheon special and various pies. The effect was oddly surreal, as if this place were trying just a bit too hard to look like it belonged in the Midwest.
Finally, Gabe spoke again. “I figure the next step is to get online and and work out exactly who’s missing,” he offered. “Rutledge was looking through news websites, looked like local papers. We can probably start there.”
Pertwee nodded his agreement. “Funny,” he chuckled over the top of his mug. “I was so intent on getting out here that I hadn’t considered what to do next.”
“We didn’t have time to come up with a real plan,” Gabe assured him. “Step one is always the scariest one anyway. So we’ll get a room, then get some names to research. After that…” he frowned. “We’ll have to find some way to get to the families. Start asking questions somehow.”
“We could get a photograph of Doctor Alderman from the university website. Perhaps someone will have seen him?”
“All the way out here?” Gabe raised his eyebrows.
Pertwee made a noise into his mug that was probably not supposed to be audible. “I thought Illinois wasn’t that far away from Missouri,” he said innocently. Before Gabe could retort, the professor added, “He never socialized with the rest of the faculty, and he had notes about this area. He probably dropped by here on weekends from time to time, or on holidays perhaps.”
Gabe had to admit, this was a possibility. Leila returned with a tray at least a yard wide, full of a selection of plates. It was dramatically more food than the menu had offered them, Gabe was almost certain of that. She insisted that the side dishes came with the meal, though. Gabe wondered how any two people could have eaten all of that.
“Hey, what brings you boys out here?” Leila asked as she folded up the tray table. “Saw the Missouri plates on the way in. We all did.” She winked at Pertwee, who gave her a congenial smile in return.
“We’re folklorists, my dear,” Pertwee smiled back. “Come to the area to learn about local stories, and such.” Gabe felt his head tilt slightly. Had Pertwee’s accent just gotten stronger?
Leila’s eyes lit up. “Oh, you’re not gonna find anything interesting here, Sugar,” she crooned. “You want that, you’re gonna have to go down to the Benton Courthouse. Or start asking around in Carbondale, the college might know something.”
“Nothing in Mount Vernon, then?” Pertwee gave the waitress a disappointed sigh. Gabe was already starting to note that little mischievous spark to Pertwee’s eyes when they glanced at each other.
“Unless you want to go talk to Bobbi about the Summerville Werewolf,” Leila scoffed. She nodded at the order window, where a head of crayon blue hair was only occasionally visible bouncing around in the kitchen. “I swear. High school kids been telling that story for thirty darn years, and nobody believes it until she’s out at three in the morning and sees the danged thing.”
Well, then. Pertwee shared a warm laugh with their waitress about the follies of youth, then the woman bustled off to get a broom for the peas that a toddler one table over was chucking onto the carpet. Gabe just tried to keep a straight face as she left.
“Folklorists?” he asked, leaning over the table slightly.
“It was worth a try,” Pertwee dismissed. “We have a killer with UV-responsive fur. Someone here might have a story.” He picked up a roll and split it open, reaching for a butter knife.
Gabe took a long drink of his cola. A small part of him was starting to wish it was something stronger than soda.
The restaurant had local newspapers available to purchase. They requested two, one called the “Southern Illinoisan” and one called the “Benton Evening News.” Leila reminded them of the courthouse when she brought them the papers. Apparently the ghost of someone that Leila assured them every local knew of was still haunting the site of his execution. “And he pulls women’s ponytails,” she told them. “I went down there once with my daughter, something pulled on her hair the whole time.”
“Only ponytails?” Pertwee asked.
“Charlie Birger liked ponytails.” Leila said it as if it were some kind of deep perversion that she didn’t approve of. Gabe had been hard-pressed not to laugh. He’d had to hide his grin with a bite of roast beef.
They opened their papers as soon as Leila had cleared away the side dishes. The Southern Illinoisan hadn’t had very much. Gabe had even scanned the obituaries. Pertwee had found a mention of an upcoming fundraiser for a local family in the Benton paper, though. Their teenage daughter, Michaela Thorne, had been found dead a few months before, beaten and drowned. Her father was still looking for her killer, trying to raise money for a private detective.
The article mentioned that the Franklin County Sherrifs hadn’t found any more evidence on the Thorne case. Gabe’s attention was grabbed by that. He remembered Tracey’s gray-faced horror at Alderman’s note, the catch in her voice when she’d talked about Franklin County. You’re just a person. The words screamed in Gabe’s head like a klaxon.
The article decided where they were going to stay for the night. A chat with Leila had sent them back down the interstate after supper, a few minutes on the road into a town that looked exactly like a million other small towns across the Midwest. Someone had clearly put some investment into the town, naturally. There was a superstore to the west of the interstate, its giant blue sign surrounded by the swarm of small strip malls and fast food joints that always sprouted up in the shadows of such places. There was even a gas station that was trying very hard to be a truck stop, not that any semi could have made it past the ancient power lines that hung so low over the roads.
Most importantly, there was a rectangular chunk of bricks glowing yellow just to the east. A sign raised up over the building advertised a vaguely respectable motel chain. It didn’t look like a motel. It looked like a prison. All it was missing was the bars over the tiny windows. Still, if it had beds it was what they were going to need.
The lobby of the motel was little more than a counter that would sport donuts and toast in the morning. There was a window cut into one wall, a desk that was half covered in pamphlets for rewards programs and local tourist attractions… well, if a museum at the old courthouse counted as tourism, anyway. Gabe wondered if this was the same courthouse that Leila had mentioned.
The woman behind the desk sold them the cheapest of the rooms the motel had to offer. Both of the men were now unemployed, after all. They had to be careful. The woman giggled when Pertwee spoke, and held up a square blue and white coffee mug that earned a chuckle from the old man as well. Gabe smiled at their laughter. He even pretended to know what a “tardis” was. He let the woman focus on a charming, benign old man while he signed the registration form. The more people who got distracted when they were around, the better.
Within ten minutes of entering their hotel room, Gabe and Pertwee had set to work.
—————————————————————————————-
To the east of Warrernsburg lies a slightly smaller city called Sedalia. It resembled Benton in many ways, from the run-down houses hidden from view by a main drag full of fluorescent lights to the air of melancholic defeat that hovered over the whole town. Louis Compte lived on the southern side of the town, in a trailer that was anchored where his father’s house had once stood. He’d inherited the family home back in the Nineties, and had spent quite a lot of time and money restoring it to a nearly new condition. He’d been so proud. Look at me, Dad. I made something of myself. One bad morning in spring, a few years before, had scattered that house and several others across the whole neighborhood. This was Missouri, after all. Tornadoes were part of life here. All the insurance money had been able to buy him was a used doublewide that he still hadn’t managed to clear the roaches out of. Still, his wife and their dog, Roscoe, had survived. That was the important thing. The doublewide could be improved upon with time, just like the family home had been. They would rebuild. Missourians would always rebuild.
Louis was sitting on a back step, watching the dog wander around on a chain as the sun set. Roscoe had been acting weird all day, and Compte couldn’t see why. He had whimpered at the front door instead of the back when he had to go out, yelping and struggling out of Gayle’s arms when she tried to put him out in the backyard. Now that Louis was home and had manhandled the family mutt onto his chain, the little dog was stretched out at the end of it to growl and whine at the mound of grass over the storm shelter.
“Damn dog,” Louis grumbled. He even opened the doors to the cellar, squinting down in the darkness. There was nothing, though, not that he could see. He hadn’t done more than scan the shadows, but he was mostly sure that he would have seen it if there had been someone hiding down there. Louis locked the padlock behind him as the sky moved from blue to black. He picked up his dog, who was still yapping and fighting to look towards the padlocked doors, and returned inside.
As soon as Louis Compte was inside, the padlock sprung itself open and the thing that poor Roscoe had been so upset by climbed out of the blackness of the storm cellar. They had failed in their task. Their master was understanding, of course, even through the anger. They were so rarely bested, after all. It hadn’t happened in centuries. For a human, barely more than a child, to have escaped them, she must have been fantastically powerful. There was hope after all. Alderman’s killer shook themselves again, as they had for most of the day. Flecks of shimmering colors reflected the light of Louis Compte’s kitchen windows as they floated to the ground.
Light was dangerous. It was unpredictable, one never knew exactly where it was or what it was going to do. All of their people knew this. The Humans had tried to collapse it, to quantify it and understand it, but light was one of the few free things left in this world. Even today, with all of their machines and their understanding, light still often eluded the Humans. It screamed truth to all, no matter how much they tried to ignore it. But it also revealed too much, too often.
Electric lights were easier. They were tamed, something that the shadow sniffing at the night air both appreciated and resented. It was cruel, what the Humans had done with their bulbs and candles. But it hid what they didn’t want to see as much as it illuminated what they did. That was something, at least. Sunlight, though? Sunlight would betray them without a thought.
They didn’t have to follow the girl’s scent. They knew where she was going. The machine on her desk, the swirling tangle of knowledge turned into just so many electrical impulses, had shone names that the creature knew all too well across the screen. She was going home.
She would be in a car. That meant highways. The creature didn’t need highways. They knew the way back, and they knew paths that the Rutledge Witch didn’t.
The creature shook themself off one last time. Then they lowered to all fours and began to run, aiming towards the southeast. It was going to be a long trip, but at least they were going home.
From my author blog, and the main reason why I’ve been so absent from here. On top of my teaching job, I’ve been publishing a chapter of this novel every week or so (with a recent break for health issues) with illustrations that I inked, painted and collaged on my own. Because I have no life, lol.
Anyway, it’s set in the American Midwest, and involves a professor murdered by an eldritch abomination that is now chasing the only witness, an autistic, queer punker, across state lines. There’s a cop chasing her too, and possibly the FBI, and there might be elves involved later because the American Midwest is just like that.
You can click on the masterpost to get all of the chapters. Enjoy!
Thank you for reading! If you don’t want to wait a week between chapters, or if you just want to support my work, the text of Chapters 1-12 is available on Kindle. Just click HERE to download them!
If you like this, feel free to reblog. This is how stories spread on Tumblr, it's great for me. Also, feel free to send me an ask if you'd like to be put on a tag list!
Gabe sat at his desk on Monday morning with his second cup of coffee, and it wasn’t helping him. He saw Davies enter his field of vision, but it took a moment to really register who she was. “Jesus, Nelson, you look terrible,” she said, dropping down into the chair in front of his desk.
“Rough night,” Gabe said. His mouth felt almost as if there were a wire shorted out between it and his brain. Gabe reminded himself that this was his Friday, and that all he really had to do was come out at the end of it with a pulse.
Davies gave a half-nod in acknowledgement. “Yeah, we’re all kind of running on half power this week. Sleep problems?”
Gabe was tired enough that he couldn’t really stop the chuckle. “Yeah, you?”
She looked at the table, frowning. “Yeah, all of us.” Gabe was suddenly aware that Davies’ hair was different. It was the first time since they’d met that he’d seen her without a bun. Today, she had a brown ponytail bobbing off of the back of her head. “You’ve got to know that it’s normal, right?” she asked. “After what we saw, it’s normal.”
“I was in Iraq for three years, I know.”
“I thought you were in the army longer.”
“I wasn’t deployed the whole time!” Gabe gave her a tired smirk, sipping at his coffee some more. He prayed that the brew would start working soon. It was cop coffee, which Gabe was reasonably sure was a controlled substance outside of law enforcement. He should have been waking up by now.
Davies nodded again, but didn’t speak for a couple of minutes. She looked as if she were trying to decide how to say something unpleasant. “Listen,” she eventually said. “I’m sorry for laughing at the glitter yesterday. That was mean.”
That was all? That was what she was nervous about? Gabe snickered slightly into his cup. “No, that was actually pretty funny,” he told her. “It was smart, too. Effective, but mostly nonviolent. And if she has to chase off a home invader like that, she can identify him pretty easily later. All we’d have to do is follow the pixie dust.”
Davies smiled, finally looking up from the desk. “Yeah, but it’s technically assault. You should have arrested her for that.”
Gabe shook his head, and rubbed his eyes a little bit with one hand. “No, I was in the wrong, there,” he confessed. “I was the one holding her door open.” Then Gabe let himself sigh. He gave a quick glance around the room. There weren’t many people there that morning. Davies was right, too. Most of the people who were there looked like the only thing standing between them and keeling over was the can of Folgers holding the place of honor by the front desk.
“You know,” Gabe said quietly, leaning over. Hopefully, Davies would be the only one to hear him. “I’m kind of glad Rutledge didn’t come in.”
Davies took the hint in Gabe’s posture, leaning over too so she could hear him. “What? Why?”
Gabe shot a look at the closed door with the “Police Chief” label on it. “Don’t you think Perkins is going overboard with this?” he asked. “Going after a kid like that?”
“She’s not a kid, Nelson, she’s twenty-four,” Davies corrected him. She brought her arms forward to rest on his desk, frowning. “Listen… Nelson, you know I like you, right?”
“Um… yeah, that’s why we’re talking right now.”
Davies sighed. “Uh-huh… Okay, so you have got to rein this in,” she said. “You’re not going to last in this field if you can’t let go of these things, man.”
Wait. What? Gabe pulled himself a bit straighter, blinking in surprise at Nelson. “What are you talking about?” he asked her.
Davies rolled her eyes. “The Chief gave an order, Nelson. He wanted the suspect taken in. You’ve got to do what you’re told here if you want a job. That good guy rebel crap only works in movies.”
No. No, Davies wasn’t saying what it sounded like she was saying. Gabe closed his eyes, trying to shake the sleep out of his head so that he could understand her. “That’s now how it works and you know it!”
“Yeah, it is,” Davies shrugged. “I don’t like it either, but it’s better than-“
“No!” Gabe insisted. “Come on, you took the same training I did! We have procedures to follow, laws specifically to stop things like this from happening!”
“And those are gorgeous ideals!” Davies argued back. “But Nelson. Come on. All they ever accomplish is letting horrible people go back into the population! They never actually protect the innocent!”
“Because people like Perkins keep breaking them!” Gabe hissed.
As soon as he said it, Davies paled, and she started looking around at the office. Gabe didn’t have to ask why. He could already guess what would happen if a sentiment like that had gotten overheard. When she leaned back forward, Davies’ normal smile was twisted into a scowl.
“If you want to stop that from happening,” she whispered, “then you’re just going to have to play the game until you get to be in charge. But you and me, we’re nothing now! People who make waves like this get kicked out of the Force long before we ever have a chance to change things!”
Gabe didn’t reply. He just stared back at Davies coldly. He thought about the job offers in Chicago and Kansas City that he had turned down, already disgusted with the politics of the job before he’d even finished his criminal justice degree. He was supposed to be helping people, not… whatever this garbage was! Davies’ expression softened after a moment into something sad.
“You know,” she said. “They don’t tell you how the police force actually works in the academy. If they did, everyone would-” Davies stopped mid-sentence and looked over Gabe’s shoulder, eyebrows drawing together a bit. “Suit alert,” she whispered.
Suits in the police station were usually something the force worried about. None of the Warrensburg officers ever wore them on the job. Half of them didn’t even bother with them on the weekends, at least not after church was over. Gabe himself only had a couple of blazers that he hadn’t had occasion to wear in a long time. No one in the station had ever seen them before.
No, if there was someone in the police station wearing a suit, that usually meant there was a lawyer in the house. What was worse was that they could predict how much trouble they were going to have by how dark the fabric was. Gabe turned around to see a charcoal gray pantsuit at the reception desk, wrapped around a woman in her mid-fifties with the kind of attitude that meant something very serious was afoot. To make matters worse, the woman made eye contact with Gabe almost as soon as he turned around. She then seemed to decide that Officer White was invisible, ignoring the receptionist’s objections to make a beeline for his own workspace.
Davies managed to get an “Oh crap” out before the woman was in earshot. “Want me to stick around?”
Gabe groaned. “No, I think I’d rather be eviscerated in private, thanks,” he grumbled. If a suit was coming for him, there was only really one person she could be working for. How in the hell had Rutledge managed to afford a lawyer?
“Hi, are you Officer Nelson?” The woman smiled at him as Davies did her best to disappear without getting noticed. It was, quite possibly, the most disinterested smile that Gabe had ever encountered. Before he could think anything disparaging about the legal profession, however, she produced a small wallet with a very different sort of identification on it. “I’m Bethany Larson, FBI.”
Gabe’s eyes widened. Oh. OH. Oh no. He leaned over to get a better look at the credentials. He was willing to bet that this was the first time an FBI agent had ever set foot inside their little Midwestern station before. The shock wore off fairly quickly, though. Gabe couldn’t actually be too surprised that the Bureau had caught wind of this case. It was too horrific. There were too many questions, even more than they had been able to write down on paper yet.
“Alderman case, right?” He didn’t need to ask. The Bureau didn’t exactly come to chat about speeding tickets and underage drunks, did they? Larson nodded.
“Oh yeah,” she said. There was something nasal in her voice, a badly hidden twang from somewhere to the north. Minnesota? Wisconsin? “I hear you were the officer collecting evidence on the night of the murder?”
“Well, no…” Gabe shook his head a bit. He blinked, but it was a bit longer than he felt it probably should have been. He took another drink of his coffee. “Davies was the one in charge of that part, actually. I’m the junior-“
Larson interrupted him. “I also hear that you were the one who released your main suspect. Am I right about that?”
Oh, crap. Too late, Gabe realized that he had stopped his head mid-shake. He was certain that he looked like an idiot now, not that Larson was showing any notice of that. He tried to straighten himself up a bit, and tried harder to look professional.
“Agent Larson, she was on the security cameras in another area of the building.” Gabe rubbed his eyelids a bit while he attempted to explain. “Even the little time she wasn’t there, it wasn’t long enough to-“
Agent Larson raised a hand to interrupt him again, or to save him. It was a tossup. “To do that, yeah,” she agreed. She moved to sit down in the seat that Davies had vacated, the one people sat in when he took their statements or filled out paperwork on them. The raised hand waved somewhat when she spoke again. “So even after they found the meth in her bag-“
“I never saw the meth.” It was Gabe’s turn to interrupt now. “Perkins wrote it down, but he retracted it later after she was free. There was some weird stuff in that bag, but I didn’t see anything illegal.”
Larson’s hand stopped moving. The fingers curled slightly inward. Her disinterested, professional smile turned curious when she heard that. “Weird?”
Gabe took one final drink of his coffee. God, but he needed it to start kicking in soon! “Yeah,” he said. “There was this thing made of hair in her bag. Black, blonde, and gray, three locks all braided together.”
For some reason, Agent Larson reached into her blazer to retrieve a small, cheaply made pad of paper. She pulled a pencil out of the spiral binding and wrote down a note. “Was there anything else unusual in there?” she asked.
“Ever looked at the average college kid’s notebook?” he asked her back, smiling. “It’ll take a specialist on youth culture to decode half of that, and one on chemistry to understand the rest.”
“You’ll probably want a twelve-year-old to look at it,” Agent Larson smiled back at him.
“She’s a scifi fan,” Gabe added. In answer to Larson’s questioning expression, he added, “There was a book in her bag, some old scifi thing. It’s ancient, too: held together with a rubber band. Probably holds some kind of significance to her, or she’d just buy a new one.”
“Hmm.” Agent Larson popped the eraser of the pencil into her mouth while she looked at her notes, a pensive expression on her face. “Your chief was on the phone when I got here. They told me to wait. I’ll need to talk to him, but we’ve got reason to believe that your murder victim might have run afoul of some people we’ve been hunting for a while now. I’m going to need to see what you’ve got before we take the case from you.”
Gabe raised an eyebrow at the detective. “Supposed to be waiting, and you came to see me,” he said, incredulous. “I’d be flattered, but I’m actually kind of worried.”
Larson gave him the kind of conspiratorial smile that he didn’t really think belonged on a Federal Agent. “Well, the fellow at the desk called me ‘Missy,’” she shrugged. “I showed him my badge and everything, and all Officer White did was grumble about how ‘first Nelson let the perp go, now the feds are here effing things up.’ Only that wasn’t the word he used. I don’t like that kind of language. Besides, I didn’t get this far by not being curious.”
The smile widened into something playful. Even Gabe had to chuckle at it. He raised a hand to scratch the back of his head, more of a nervous tic than an itch. “Yeah, they can get, ah, colorful in this job,” he blushed. Then his own smile faltered. “Uh-oh.”
The door to the Chief’s office had just opened, and Perkins had just appeared. The older man’s irritation was painted across his features, and it only got worse when he scanned the station to see the FBI agent at Gabe’s desk. “You’re armed, right?” Gabe asked, only half-jokingly.
Agent Larson turned in her seat and nodded a greeting to the approaching figure of Gabe’s boss. “Oh, don’t worry, son,” she assured him. “I deal with his kind all the time.”
“Miss Larson, I was under the impression that FBI agents were supposed to report to the man in charge of the station before taking control of an investigation.” Chief Perkins was clearly doing everything in his power to not openly shout at their visitor. He wasn’t very convincing, though. After being the chief of police for as long as he had, the man had gotten very, very used to being the most important person in the room. He didn’t seem to know exactly how to handle it when he wasn’t.
“I was just visiting with this fellow, that’s all.” Larson made the same idle handwaving gesture at Perkins that she had at Gabe initially, a nonverbal cue that he hadn’t yet proven himself to be worth her full concern. Gabe suddenly realized that his own mother had waved her hand exactly like that many times when he’d been younger, when he’d rambled on about something that children always assumed was vital information while she had been busy with something else.
Perkins gave Gabe a very clear warning in his glare, the kind that promised all sorts of misery if he had stepped out of line, before replying. “Oh, I’m sure you’re going to want to talk to Officer Nelson a whole lot! Why don’t you ask him why he released our only suspect without permission, then couldn’t get her back into the station even after going to her house and talking to her in person?”
Well, when you put it that way. Gabe picked up his mug with a sigh, then remembered that it was empty. Agent Larson listened to Perkins’ rant, all ears now. Then she nodded. She didn’t get up, though. “Actually, I was more curious about why you feel so certain that a hundred sixty pound woman was able to murder a two hundred pound man and tear him into pieces without getting so much as a mark on her,” she asked calmly. Gabe hadn’t thought that Perkins’ face could get any redder, and technically he was right. Chief Perkins was starting to look distinctly purple now.
“Rutledge was the only person in the building, and she had a motive!” the Chief defended. “She’s already a known weirdo, a junkie! I’ve heard stories about what people can do when they get all jacked up, you know?”
Larson glanced over at Gabe. “Nelson, he said you talked to her. Think she was on the kind of drugs that could do that?”
Gabe tried not to see the wide, threatening stare that Perkins was aiming at him behind Larson’s back. Oh, man… he thought. I am so glad that this is my Friday. Gabe’s mouth went dry, and his stomach twisted. This was why he hadn’t gone to the city, damn it! He’d been specifically trying not to get in a situation like this, caught between the truth and his duty.
But… his duty was the truth, right? Gabe took a deep breath. Then he pulled himself up in his seat. If he’d been standing he would have looked like he were in a military formation. “No, ma’am, I do not,” he said. “I don’t know if she’s completely clean, probably not, but those kinds of drugs leave physical traces. There were no needle marks. She’s in too good of a shape physically to have been on anything heavy for long, and she was far too lucid to have been high the night Alderman was murdered. Besides, she was tested that night.”
“Why do you think she was high, Chief Perkins?” Larson smiled up at a policeman who was beginning to look like he was considering adding a second homicide to their week.
“He doesn’t,” Gabe stated. “He tried to falsify the evidence report. I released her before it could be filed, and before he could ruin an innocent woman’s life. That’s all.”
Before Perkins’ sputtering could begin to form actual words, Agent Larson stood up. She produced a stapled stack of papers from a leather shoulder bag, the kind that women wore when they didn’t want to bother with an actual briefcase to carry things around. The paperwork was handed to a man who Gabe felt was about to become his worst enemy.
“Chief Perkins, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is going to be taking over this case,” she told him in a flat tone that had clearly been practiced before. “I’d like Officer Nelson to take me to this evidence locker of yours. I’ll be taking everything pertaining to the case with me when I go.”
“Take him with you, why don’t you?” Perkins snarled, pointing to Gabe. “Boy, you could have been a damned fine cop if you hadn’t fucked this up so badly! I want your badge and sidearm before you leave this building, you hear me?”
Gabe sighed. He saw Davies by the interview room suddenly lower her forehead into the palm of one hand. She hadn’t been facing them. She hadn’t needed to. Everyone had heard this exchange. Agent Larson gave a small, annoyed sigh. “Yes, that’s a lovely thing to say in front of the FBI agent, Chief Perkins. Great job. Now could you give him the keys before you write up his dismissal paperwork? For some reason, I just don’t trust you to give me the right evidence.”
Perkins answered Larson’s less than friendly smile with a sneer. He shot one last withering look at Gabe, then he motioned for them to follow him into the back room.
“You’re not bad, Nelson,” the agent told him once the door was closed. “Not many rookies would have had the nerve to stand up to a jerk like this.”
“I’m sitting right here,” Perkins growled from his desk. Larson didn’t give him more than a cursory glance. She just held out her hand, wiggling her fingers demandingly. Perkins grudgingly reached into his desk to retrieve a set of small, mismatched keys.
“Hey, is that one of those pod coffeemakers?” she asked, giving the Chief’s machine a very thirsty look. She dropped her shoulder bag unceremoniously onto the chair in front of his desk. “I’ve been up since about five, I’d dearly love something to perk up with.”
“Fuck you.” The Chief actually raised a finger at her. Then he was out of the room before she could ask him again. Agent Larson stared after him, shaking her head. Gabe could already hear Perkins shouting something at Davies about her uniform being somehow imperfect. It really did flow downhill, didn’t it?
“That was satisfying,” Agent Larson chuckled. “Now, where were we?”
The evidence, for all of the time it had taken to catalogue everything, was depressingly scant. They had a couple of flatpack cardboard cartons and the tower from Alderman’s computer locked in one of the storage closets, and a cooler in the fridge full of assorted DNA and tissue samples. “Most of the squishy parts went to the morgue,” Nelson said as he laid the second box out on the Chief’s desk. “But there wasn’t anything unusual in the office that we found. It’s mostly just pictures of the scene and files from his coworkers. Maybe a little mail.”
Agent Larson had picked up the file marked “Rutledge, Tracey U.,” and was flipping through it. “How was this not sealed when she turned eighteen?” she asked.
“I wondered that too,” Gabe told her. There was the bag with the beads. The blood was crusted on them now, and grayish hairs stuck out of it like mangled adobe. “Hey, do you have a blacklight, by any chance?”
If Agent Larson had heard him, she didn’t show it. “Holy smokes, an Amber Alert?” She grinned at the file as if it were a comic book. “Has anyone called these old contacts of hers yet? This man they investigated might know something.”
“What would he know?” Gabe asked. He glanced at the door, then leaned over the box to speak quietly. “She hasn’t been back to Franklin County in years. Actually, when it came up, she sounded scared of it.”
The manila folder snapped closed. Agent Larson’s expression focused in on Gabe, and she dropped her voice in response to him. “When did you talk to her last?”
“Last night. We, ah…” Yep, there was that dry mouth again. “We ran into each other last night, and Illinois came up. She looked kind of shellshocked by it, if you get my meaning.”
Agent Larson nodded. She scanned the boxes, lips thin. “Right,” she said, almost to herself. “I can get the boxes to my car if you can carry the computer and the cooler. We need to talk somewhere else, I think.”
“Yeah, I think you might be right.” Gabe picked up the computer. After hanging her messenger bag across her body and stacking the cartons, Larson carried them to the door. She let Gabe open it, though.
The walk out of the station was accompanied by about half a dozen stares from people that Gabe had worked with for just over a year now. Davies’ attempts not to show how horrified she was at all of this were failing miserably. Gabe shot her a tight-lipped nod as they passed.
Agent Larson had to sign a few forms at the front desk, but except for some gawking, after that they were left alone. For all of Perkins’ ranting, the underlings in the station didn’t really care who came to rescue them from this case. They just wanted it far away from them.
“BADGE, NELSON!” the Chief shouted, just as they reached the front door. Gabe sighed in frustration, but he kept holding the door open for Agent Larson.
“Be right with you,” he muttered.
“If you set the computer down there, I can come get it,” she replied with a casual shrug. “I’ll stick around until you’re done.”
The actual firing was freakishly mundane. Gabe handed in his badge. He turned in his firearm, and signed release forms stating that everything was intact. He offered to come back later to clean out his desk, but Perkins said that there would be a box waiting for him. He also said that Gabe had damned well better not show his face in the station before he came to turn in his uniform later, or for a good while afterwards.
By the time Gabe actually came out of the station, Agent Larson had finished belting the computer tower into the middle seat of a cluttered blue minivan. “So, is there a place to eat before we go see this Miss Rutledge?” she asked. “I have to drop this off at my hotel room, but you’ve got something to tell me, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Gabe nodded. He didn’t know why, but he felt much the same as he had in Sunday School, when Mrs. Jenkins had been passing out coloring sheets to the children. It was the smile, it had to be. Larson smiled like a grandmother.
“Come on,” she nodded towards the passenger-side door and started climbing through the car to get to the steering wheel. “I’ll drive, you’re not awake enough yet.”
Gabe smiled ruefully. “Is it that obvious?”
“You betcha. Hop in.”
He nodded and slid the back door closed. “Well, there’s a place up by the highway, where-“
Gabe was interrupted by the sound of his phone ringing. “Sorry, just a second here.”
He reached onto his belt for the phone that was always clipped there. “Officer…” Gabe stopped, wincing slightly. Nope. He couldn’t very well say that anymore. “Gabe Nelson, can I help you?”
The accent on the other end of the line identified the voice as the old professor that Gabe had spoken to on Saturday. “Hello, Officer,” he said. “I do hope this doesn’t cause any trouble, but I’m rather worried about Tracey.”
Gabe rubbed his eyes again with his free hand, leaning against the side of Agent Larson’s van. He should have gotten another cup of coffee before leaving. Perhaps there would be some at the restaurant by the highway. “Okay,” he said, after a sigh. “What’s wrong?” Agent Larson had already settled herself in the driver’s seat. She shot him an arched eyebrow through the passenger-side window.
“Well, classes were cancelled because of poor Jonas, but she was supposed to come by my apartment this morning so she could work on her practicum research,” the professor’s voice warbled through the speaker. “It’s rather time-sensitive, unfortunately. When she was late, I called her, and she didn’t answer.”
“Could she have overslept?” She couldn’t have gotten to sleep before he had, not as nervous as the girl had been. And he’d seen the sunrise.
“No, I called her three times. Then I went to her apartment, and there’s nobody answering the front door.”
That got Gabe’s attention. He pushed off of the side of the van and reached for the door handle. Agent Larson took one look at the expression on his face, and her own eyes widened in response. Every law enforcement agent knew this look. She immediately started the ignition and began pulling out of the parking spot.
Gabe covered the receiver of his phone and addressed the agent. “Head south,” he said. “I’ll tell you which way to go.” Removing his hand, he spoke to Pertwee again. “Are you at the apartment now?”
“Yes, I’m in my car outside,” the old man told him. “Officer, Tracey wouldn’t miss this meeting. The girl’s been eating, sleeping, and breathing this project for most of the year. She was working on it the night that…” Pertwee trailed off. “Well, that night, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.” That night. Two nights ago, now. Or did it count as three? “Listen, you stay inside that car, okay? I’m on the way, be there in a few minutes. If you see her, call me again. Try to keep her there if possible, but stay in that car.”
Pertwee was quiet for a moment. Gabe could almost year the professor’s nervous gulp. “Yes, I’ll… I’ll do my best.”
Gabe hung up the phone. He pointed towards a left-hand turn that would take them straight into one of the many poor neighborhoods of town, far from the apartments catering to the kids whose parents could actually afford college tuitions. Most of the non-academic citizens of Warrensburg lived in this kind of neighborhood, sadly.
“What’s happened?” Agent Larson asked.
“I think our witness might have just gone missing,”
Comfort foods make up some of our fondest memories. In this episode, we explore a common comfort food today and look for its roots in the 18th century. Let's...
PO. TA. TOES. Once again, Jon Townsend is on my blog. Dude is the Mr. Rogers of cooking, I love watching his videos. There’s a bit at the end about how community and mutual aid keep you alive in hard times, it’s worth your time.
Thank you for reading! If you don’t want to wait a week between chapters, or if you just want to support my work, the text of Chapters 1-12 is available on Kindle. Just click HERE to download them!
If you like this, feel free to reblog. It's great for me. Also, feel free to send me an ask if you'd like to be put on a tag list!
Tracey didn’t even bother to hang up her car keys when she got home. She had a place for them, a plain hook in the wall next to the door. She just didn’t care enough to actually use it. There were three locks on her door other than the one on the handle. One was a deadbolt, the kind that Tracey could lock and unlock from the other side. Another was a plain, boring slide lock. The third was one that Tracey had installed herself, a piece that she’d paid more for than she’d wanted to, but when she’d learned that she herself couldn’t bypass it she’d had to have it. That lock had already kept many a stoned neighbor from wandering into her apartment. It had been a good investment.
Tracey locked everything she could on her door. She briefly glanced at a sparkling bowl under the hook. She’d used more than she’d intended to get rid of that cop when he’d come. There was a jar in her desk that she could refill it with, so she picked the bowl up on her way to her computer.
She had her real priority open almost as soon as she’d sat down at her desk, though. The file wasn’t from any class that she was aware of, that was for certain. Alderman’s scrawled pen spelled out compounds and reactions that would have made perfect sense to Tracey, except she couldn’t quite work out what the chemicals were. Tracey’s mental shortcuts that she had developed, the tricks she used to connect details into wholes, strained to process the information on Alderman’s reports. There were carbon rings, plenty of carbon rings. These were organic molecules, then. Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, these compounds had all of the basics of life. Calcium. Phosphorus.
Tracey turned a page, the cup of glitter forgotten next to her monitor. She saw a honeycombed lattice of a diagram. It was familiar enough. That was a heme molecule, or it would have been if there had been iron in the middle of it. Instead, there was a magnesium ion staring up at her. Oh well, Alderman had been a phytochemist. Chlorophyll had magnesium. Why would a plant chemistry teacher have been studying heme, though? That was a blood chemical, wasn’t it?
Tracey rubbed her eyes and turned another page. She wondered if this would have been easier if her organic chemistry requirement hadn’t been fulfilled over a year ago. Wait. Phytosapiens, that had been what was on the sticky note. No, that didn’t make sense at all. Nothing “phyto” was ever “sapiens.” That was part of the definition of the “phyto” kingdom.
Wait. Was that… Tracey blinked at the images, printed out and fastened to the page with a paperclip. She blinked again. She closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to reset herself. Tracey had only figured out recently that most people didn’t have to sort through the details before they could see something. Sometimes she was jealous of them. Other times, she comforted herself that she saw what others missed, the bits that their minds skipped over in an attempt to make sense of the whole.
But there was no whole here to make sense of. Printed ink, this wasn’t a drawing. Nucleus. Mitochondria. It was a cell. Soft cell walls, so it was animal. But it was wrong. It was completely wrong. That shouldn’t have been there. If those were there, they should have been bigger. Tracey wasn’t a life sciences student, but even a high schooler would have seen that this was wrong, wouldn’t they? It should have been a drawing, something speculative that could never actually exist. “Oh, bullshit,” Tracey muttered.
She turned another page. This one had notes scribbled in between the formulae. Hormones secreted by adrenal analogues improve the results of the in vitro tests, Alderman’s handwriting read. All experiments show that the hormone-dependent phytocompounds present in the extracts of samples change in response to stimuli, increasing subject serotonin and dopamine production at a rate of thirty-seven percent over unstimulated extracts.
Phytocompound. That was what the word said. The chemicals Alderman had been working on were from plants. They had to be. Plants didn’t have adrenal glands, though. Those were animal.
Another page. More notes. Five samples collected from Elkville, IL. Tracey felt her stomach turn. No. Not another town she knew. This one was in Jackson County. It shared a border with Franklin. There was a university a few miles away from Elkville that had been discussed for her, not that she’d have ever had a chance at going to college back then. Two samples collected from Herrin, IL. Rumors of a concentrated population nearby.
“Alderman, what were you getting into…” Tracey asked nobody. She pulled the sticky note off of the front of the file. No, that was insane. There was no way.
Tracey set the file to the side, on top of a stack of textbooks from classes she’d never taken, and clicked on her monitor. There were two newspapers that she could think of, and she opened their websites up in two different tabs. On each website, she entered the same terms into the search bar. Tracey scanned the resulting entries, and felt that little twist of nausea turn into a block of ice.
Tracey sat back in her chair. What she was seeing, no, that wasn’t possible. It was a coincidence, it had to be. It wasn’t… it couldn’t be real…
Tracey’s mind flashed back, to another night in another place. She remembered the wind, loud enough to drown out the thunder, and the red and blue lights of Officer Kingsley’s squad car. A smug smile from the face of a squat, gray-haired woman mocking her silently as she pretended to console her. The smile too wide… the unblinking eyes with no pupils…
Who was Tracey kidding? If it was going to happen anywhere, it would have happened there.
The print on the wall, too long to be fingers and too high up, she remembered. Pink tendons ripped. A splinter of bone falling from the corner of the desk. Copper in her nose, copper and ammonia and methane, blood and bowels so strong she could taste it as well as smell it, and the acrylic carpet squeaking and squelching and under it all that smell of wet dog. If it came from anywhere, where the hell else would it have come from?
Gods, just the memory of it brought the smell back. Tracey raised both of her hands to her eyes, trying to rub the fatigue out of them. She didn’t want to sleep, though. She couldn’t sleep now, it would only mean seeing all of that again, this time probably with a too-wide smile grinning at her from behind Alderman’s dark, black window.
The smell wasn’t fading. Every muscle in Tracey’s body suddenly froze in that realization, and she felt her own terror start to flow again, just like it had two nights before. Wet dog. It wasn’t a memory, she could actually smell it now, and it was so much stronger than it had been on the night Alderman had died. It was here. It wasn’t something in the recent past, it was something that was coming now.
Something in Tracey’s mind flashed into a state that she hadn’t felt in a long time. It wasn’t fear, exactly. Fear was there, of course it was. But fear was easy. It wasn’t a siren stabbing at her ears, or a fluorescent light hammering at her skull. Fear was just an emotion, and one Tracey knew she didn’t have time for now. She moved as quietly as she could, gathering up the file and the notes into the campus backpack. Gods, but she wished she had been able to keep her old backpack now! Oh well. She’d had to make do before, hadn’t she?
Tracey took a mental note. She kept all of her windows latched as a matter of habit. But then, who was to say that Alderman hadn’t as well? The next move was to the basket on her sofa, to the mess of clean clothes that were now wrinkled beyond logic. She grabbed several handfuls of fabric and stuffed them haphazardly into the bag.
The smell got stronger, almost strong enough to make her sick. Tracey couldn’t work out where it was coming from, though. She could almost feel her pulse pounding in her ears. Were they ringing? What was that?
There! There was a small noise, an almost inaudible scraping sound of steel against steel. The front door. Tracey looked up from the basket and saw the slide lock being pushed slowly, ever-so-carefully, open. Careful means intelligent, Tracey noted without really thinking. Intelligent and careful together means they don’t know that I know.
There were three more locks to get past. Tracey had enough time, surely. There was a possibility that the third lock would stop them, but as she saw the slide bolt click completely open that hope faded. If they were from that part of America, there was no telling what they could do. The bits of Alderman sitting in the morgue were proof enough of that.
Still tiptoeing across her carpet, still convinced that the canvas shoes were too loud, Tracey made for the one room that could save her. Her apartment was in the attic of a building that, once upon a time, had been a house. The closet didn’t just have an extra lock to put between her and whatever… whomever was coming. It also had a small door in the back, forgotten until her arrival, that led into the storage spaces of the attic.
She paused by the desk. Oh. Oh. She had one weapon to slow down the intruder. There was a click as the lock on her door handle popped open. Tracey grabbed the half-empty bowl before ducking into her closet. She slid the clothes aside, carefully balancing the bowl on the hangars as she closed the closet door. The smaller door latched behind her just as she heard the front door of her apartment open completely. Tracey turned towards the one light in the attic, the grate covering the vent in the front of the house, and made for it as quickly as she could.
She was on the roof over the front porch when she heard the roar. Tracey didn’t wait to learn what had made it.
Chapter Summary: Gabe sneaks into the murder scene looking for answers. He doesn't like what he finds.
Tags: See the Masterpost.
Thank you for reading! If you don’t want to wait a week between chapters, or if you just want to support my work, the text of Chapters 1-12 is available on Kindle. Just click HERE to download them!
Also, feel free to send me an ask if you'd like to be put on a tag list!
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Gabe parked at a gas station a couple of blocks away from the university. He didn’t want anyone seeing his car parked anywhere near the college, or the questions that would bring. He didn’t work too hard to avoid the campus security patrols when he crossed the school grounds, though. People wandered through here all the time, after all. Who would take notice of a young man on a college campus? Gabe waited until the coast was clear to unlock the glass door of the Morris Building, then he ducked through and locked the door behind him. He prayed that the security guards would be negligent enough not to actually go inside the buildings as they patrolled.
The hall ran through the middle of the building with classrooms on either side. Thankfully, this meant that Gabe didn’t have to maneuver around windows that often. He could use his flashlight and be relatively sure that no one would see him. The climb to the fourth floor was slightly more stressful. Someone had opted to let the stairwells be lit with natural light, which meant glass that took up most of the walls above waist height on the landings. Gabe had to work hard to balance between climbing slowly enough to be aware of his surroundings, and quickly enough to avoid being seen from outside.
Gabe opened the door to the fourth floor as quietly as he could. Even the tiny squeak of the hinges sounded like a jet engine, he was so nervous. The door latching closed behind him was even worse. He froze, listening, dreading to hear footsteps or a guard’s radio static. Several seconds passed before he was able to work up the nerve to turn his flashlight back on.
When he stared walking again he put his weight down slowly on the toes first, like they’d taught kids to do in Boy Scouts. Gabe remembered being told some story about Native Americans walking like this. It was supposed to make them soundless, right? Gabe did not feel soundless at all, but there weren’t many other noises in the building. Maybe it didn’t matter so much.
He turned right at the first bend in the hall, peeking his head around the corner gingerly first to make sure the coast was clear. The hall was nearly pitch black. The only visible lights came from the computer science lab, little blinking colors under the desks. They flickered like Christmas lights through the windows surrounding the lab. Gabe’s flashlight reflected against the glass briefly before he turned away. There were the footprints that Rutledge had left behind on her way to the bathroom. They had turned dark over the couple of days since the murder. The blood had gone from red to brown, almost black in the dim flashlight beam. They’re going to have to replace that linoleum, Gabe thought. Should have cleaned that already. If this town had a halfway decent police team, they might have been able to.
He shook his head at the footprints. Who could believe that someone could dismember a grown man, then have to throw up after it was done, and then could have still been that cool at the interrogation? Another confusing element added itself to the pile of unrealistic things in Gabe’s head. Cases like this were the reason why he had refused to work in the city, damn it!
There was one more bend in the hall before he was in the Chemistry department, and Gabe did not want to take it. So much of him simply wanted to turn back around and see if he could make it away from the college before anyone saw him. He could go back to his trailer, and spend an insomnia-filled night streaming more old movies like a normal person should. He couldn’t stop now, though. He had to check. He needed to know. Gabe lifted the police line tape over his head and continued.
There was the door now. Rutledge’s prints were thicker here, where the blood hadn’t tracked off of her boots so much yet. Gabe took the handle as gently as he could. The door, however, swung quietly open before he could turn it.
Gabe stopped, looking down at the door with a sort of falling sensation in his chest. A small piece of duct tape was stuck over the latch, and it had not been put there by any police officer. Gabe’s shoulders slumped. He stopped the curse just short of leaving his mouth. His eyes flashed about the larger hall of the science building before peering into the smaller passage that the offices branched off of.
Someone had been here. Someone was, if that tape was any indication, still here. Gabe was suddenly very aware that he hadn’t brought his sidearm with him. He’d left it behind, not wanting to risk getting caught with a gun in the middle of a crime like this. That was now far less of a worry than the risk of whomever was in here now.
Unfortunately, that someone now meant that Gabe couldn’t turn back. He wanted to. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than his sofa and those terrible old movies. Gabe slid the door back into place behind him and shone his light down the narrow corridor. The smell was a bit better now, at least. Once the more solid parts of Doctor Alderman had been taken away, the rest had been allowed to dry. The school had probably left one window open. The screens would have kept the bugs out, in theory. Gabe stepped forward slowly, ears craning for some clue as to where the other intruder was. He prayed silently that they weren’t in the room he had been heading for.
There! It wasn’t in Alderman’s office! The rustling sound had come from across the hall, behind a closed door with a collection of printed out webcomics stuck to it. Oh god oh god oh god. Gabe flattened himself against the wall next to the door. If he’d brought his gun, he might have considered just opening it. He didn’t know who was in there, though. He didn’t know what they had. He certainly didn’t want them to have a chance to prepare.
It took a few minutes. Every now and then, just when Gabe was starting to wonder if he’d imagined it all, there would be another noise. Another rustle. A creak of a file cabinet. The tapping of computer keys. Gabe stayed frozen. He wondered how they did it all without any light seeping out under the door. There had to have been at least an inch of space there. A flashlight should have been visible.
Finally, the rustling got more pronounced. Whoever was in there seemed to have been cleaning up. Gabe hadn’t thought he could be any more tense, but when he realized that they were coming out he braced himself. He knew how this was likely to go, that speed was the only chance he had.
The handle turned. It wasn’t as quiet as Gabe had managed with the other doors, but someone was definitely putting in an effort. The door edged open. A dark figure stepped out, not much more than a silhouette, a piece of darkness that was just a bit heavier than the rest. Gabe swung his flashlight up, turning it on just as it reached the face of the suspect.
“Freeze!” he barked. He tried to say “Police!” after it, as if he were there officially, but he didn’t make it past the first syllable.
The intruder’s eyes clapped closed against the sudden light, and she stumbled backwards against the frame of the door. Before she could fall, though, a blur of fabric swung up in defense, flashing red in the beam of light. Gabe moved just a fraction of a second too late to block it. He caught the drawstring backpack directly on the side of the head. If the bag had been holding anything heavy, the blow would have been devastating. Even as light as it was, it still threw him just off balance enough. Gabe’s flashlight flew out of his hands and bounced off of the drywall with a loud crack. Shadows danced against beige walls as it spun.
There was a sharp pain in Gabe’s stomach where a foot planted itself firmly in his solar plexus. Apparently, his opponent had caught her balance first. Gabe lost quite a bit of his, folding over for just a moment as he tried to get his breath back.
A voice spoke from behind where the flashlight landed. It sounded depressingly familiar.
“Nelson?”
As Gabe blinked back up at the silhouette, still gasping, she reached down to pick up the fallen flashlight. Ripped jeans were the first thing Gabe saw, over the canvas shoes that the station had given her. Then there was a tee shirt that had been spattered and stained by several different colors of paint until you could barely tell that it had once been black. She aimed the light at the ceiling, where the white suspended tiles reflected the beam around them both, and Tracey Rutledge’s face became visible. She was glaring at him with the same furious expression that Gabe had given his younger sister so many times as a boy.
“For fuck’s sake, Nelson!” Rutledge was snarling. “What the hell are you even doing here?”
Gabe braced himself on the wall to stand back up. “ME?” he panted. “Are you insane?”
Rutledge looked at him as if he were an idiot for even asking that question. “It’s three-thirty in the morning, jackass. What, did I trip an alarm somewhere?”
“I didn’t think people actually returned to crime scenes!” he snapped at her. “If this is you trying to look innocent, you’re doing it wrong!”
Rutledge glanced downward to his belt. “Did you seriously come to this crime scene without a gun?”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“No,” she told him. Gabe growled. This had to be the most ridiculous suspect in history! “I was looking for dog hair.”
Gabe gaped at Rutledge. “Dog hair?” he asked. “Dog hair? What is that even.. do you have any idea what kind of trouble you’re in right now?”
“I’m going to jail anyway!” She threw out the hand holding her bag slightly in exasperation. “Your boss probably has the paperwork all ready to go, just needs to find something he can pretend is evidence! I might as well actually commit a crime.”
“Like tampering with the real evidence?” Gabe countered. Before she could reply to him, he raised both hands to silence her. “Dammit, Rutledge! Now I have to take you in, do you know that? You could have proved yourself innocent in court if you needed to! You might even have convinced a prosecutor! Now you’re…”
Gabe had expected Rutledge to argue, or to try to interrupt him as he ranted. At the very least she could have shown that she understood just how wrongly she had acted. Instead, he saw a slow realization dawn on her face, followed by a smile. It wasn’t a friendly smile, either. He stopped mid-sentence. Something glimmered behind Rutledge’s eyes that made Gabe think about a cat zeroing in on an elusive red dot.
“Now I’m at the same crime scene you are.” Rutledge’s bag bounced against her thigh a little bit as she rested her hand on her hip.
Gabe pulled himself a little bit taller. He shook his head. “No, no, I’m a cop. You’re the murder suspect.”
“No visible badge,” Rutledge purred, glancing back down at his belt. “No gun where you can get it. I would have heard you radioing if you had contacted the station, and not even this dumb fuck campus would have let you in here at three-thirty without a security guard escorting you.” Gabe felt his shoulders falling slightly. “I told you,” Rutledge said. “I’m not stupid.”
He sighed, but as much as he hated it, Rutledge had won this round too. “And we both know I’m not going to come up with a story,” he admitted.
“You’re too much of a Boy Scout to lie well anyway,” she smiled. “You here for the fur too?” Gabe nodded. Tracey nodded too, gesturing towards the door she had just come out of. “I was looking for information on what Alderman was working on.”
“How do you know he had a project going?” Gabe asked.
Rutledge looked at him again. For an instant, Gabe wondered if he could feel his own IQ shrinking under her scrutiny. “He’s a university professor who hates teaching. Of course he has a project,” she said. There was a flash of something sadder on her face. “Had. He… he had a project. Not has.”
Gabe glanced downward for a second. “The faculty said you two had some kind of…” Tracey’s expression hardened again. “Pertwee said you weren’t, you know, together.”
It might have been the light, but Gabe thought he saw Rutledge’s face take on a slightly greenish hue. “Ew, man,” she said. “Just ew.”
“So, what was going on?”
Rutledge’s head cocked sideways, a pensive expression drifting across her in the shadows. He could almost see the calculations going on in her mind, deciding whether or not to tell him. “The more we know about him,” Gabe added, “the more likely we are to learn how this happened.”
The sides of her jaw clenched for an instant. Then she took a slow breath. “He was a perv,” Rutledge told him. “I caught him on video trying to trade grades for blow jobs from freshman chicks. Sent a copy to his wife, told him that the next video was going to the president of the college.”
Gabe pressed his lips together in a frown. “So you were blackmailing him,” he said, in a cold voice.
“Had to get him to stop somehow!” Rutledge argued. “The department lost three good students last year who were just too hot to pass without getting him off! You can’t tell me that’s not bullshit!”
Gabe wanted to argue that school boards and university directors existed for things like this. It was their jobs to handle complaints of sexual harassment, not hers. He didn’t bother. Somehow, he didn’t think it would end well for him. Instead, Gabe shook his head and brought his gaze up to Alderman’s door.
“So what did you find in there?” he asked.
Rutledge glanced at the door for a very brief moment before looking away, towards the stained carpet between them. “I, ah…” She looked back up at the door again, wide-eyed. Gabe nodded, looking downwards a bit as well.
“Couldn’t work up the nerve, huh?” he asked.
“I’m not scared!” she snapped at him. “I just… I decided to check Doctor Blake’s office first.”
Gabe nodded again. “Yeah, I don’t really want to go in there either,” he told her. Both of them watched the door this time. There was something in Gabe’s subconscious that almost expected it to move of its own accord. Then Gabe turned to glance at Blake’s door. “Wait, why that office?”
“Blake does a lot of the classses for the forensic science majors,” Tracey explained. She was still staring at Alderman’s door. Her eyes were wide, and her face looked grayer than it should have. “Figured if anyone would be sniffing around, it’d be her.”
“Not just her,” Gabe muttered. “Did you find anything?”
Rutledge nodded. “I found a folder on Blake’s desk, but it was in Alderman’s handwriting,” she said. “She probably broke in on Saturday morning before the other profs got here.”
Gabe turned to head into the other professor’s office. “It’s not there anymore, moron!” Rutledge snarked. “I’m gonna read it at home!”
“No, you’re going to give it to me, and I’m going to give it to the State Police,” Gabe argued.
“Eat me,” she retorted. “You’re in the same place I am now, Skippy,”
“Don’t call me that, I’m a cop!”
“Officer Skippy? Detective Skippy?”
Gabe scowled at her. “Shut up,” he grumbled. Rutledge raised her hand in a mocking salute.
“Junior Deputy Skippy?”
He rolled his eyes and groaned. “I’m going into this office now,” Gabe told her. Tracey’s salute wilted a little. She gave him a curt nod, and he opened Alderman’s door.
The flashlight clicked off as the door opened. “What? No, turn it back on!” For some reason, Gabe was whispering now. He didn’t know why. They had been arguing quietly in the hall, but still somewhat audibly. Now they were entering the office itself, though. Neither of them wanted to actually speak out loud here.
“The office has windows,” Tracey said. “You want some random to see the light?”
“I’d like to see, myself!”
“Give your eyes a minute, you’ll be fine,” came her frustrated reply. Rutledge ducked past him to get inside.
Oh yeah. There was the smell, rotten meat and excrement in equal measures. The open windows had helped, but the growing warmth of a Missouri spring had tempered how much good the ventilation would have been able to do. It caught in Gabe’s throat and put a lump in his gut. Rutledge, a couple of feet ahead of him, sounded like she was trying to hold back a gag of her own.
“Try not to puke on the crime scene,” Gabe whispered. “It’ll just make things worse.”
The carpet, dry now, crackled under them as they stepped across the patches. As Gabe’s eyes adjusted, he could see Rutledge carefully stepping over them. He scanned the room in the darkness and tried to ignore the chills going down his spine. Wait… no. Rutledge had just stepped over the first ones. She was crouching down by the door, behind him now, reaching into her bag for something.
When she realized he was looking, Rutledge explained. “Found something in the blood on my pants, wanted to see if it was here,” she told him.
“What was it?” Gabe asked.
Rutledge pulled a small cylinder out of her bag and held it out to him. “Iron filings,” she replied. “Lots of them. Here, if you have to use a flashlight, use this. But don’t shine it out the window, okay?”
The flashlight was cold in his hand. He didn’t know why, but the metal casing surprised him. He pressed the switch. “A blacklight?” he asked.
“You didn’t look at the room with blacklight?” Rutledge was still digging in her bag, not looking at him.
“We can’t afford things like that,” Gabe mused, turning the light around to inspect it curiously. “The State police will, probably.”
Rutledge found what she was looking for, and pulled a plastic freezer bag out. She glanced up, but whatever she was about to say disappeared into the wide, gleeful smile she shot him. It made her look like a different person, and for an instant Gabe could see the smirking teenager from her juvie file again. Gabe felt more than a little bit uncomfortable under the weight of that smile. “What?” he asked.
“You’ve got so many freckles!”
Gabe aimed the blacklight away from his face, and back at her. “Focus, Rutledge.” Her own face only had a couple of visible dots under the beam, he noticed, but that was it. “Does iron show up under blacklight?”
“No,” Rutledge said derisively. “It’s just iron. Other stuff does, though. Go play detective or something.” She waved her free hand at the room. Gabe noticed that it was no longer holding his flashlight, and that her bag had a distinctive weight in the bottom of it.
Gabe scanned the room with the blacklight, taking care not to let the beam near the windows. Blood, despite what everyone who wrote television shows seemed to think, did not glow under blacklight. It had to be treated with a special chemical to make it do that. Even if it did, Rutledge’s little novelty light wouldn’t have been enough to see anything well.
He stepped away from the girl, aiming the light haphazardly around the black splotches of blood. Papers lay scattered around the room, where they hadn’t been soaked and removed. They shone blue under the ultraviolet. The walls had been grayish white before the attack. Now they glimmered purple where they were still visible.
Without Alderman’s computer or file cabinet there was only so much that Gabe could see being available to them in terms of clues. Rutledge’s comments about dog hair kept his eyes on the carpet, but it had been so drenched in blood that he couldn’t really imagine anything showing up. He opened a collection of drawers in the professor’s desk, flipping through assorted papers and notebooks for anything that might have been missed the first time around.
“Hey, Rutledge,” he called over. The girl looked up from the door, where she was scratching at the matted carpet with something pointed that glinted like metal. “What’s a ‘Phytosapiens?’”
“It’s on a sticky note in his pencil drawer. ‘Phytosapiens colony, Valium, eleven?’ I think it’s Valium. It’s kinda messy.”
“Take it,” she told him. “Anything nearby that looks… oh yeah. Jackpot!”
Gabe aimed the light back towards her. In the dim glow from that distance, he could see Rutledge holding up the bag, folded backwards over her hand. She held a palm-sized black blob in it. “Is that your iron filings?”
Rutledge nodded. “Yeah, looks like he dumped a buttload of it in front of the door.”
“Why…” Gabe shook his head, confused. “Why would anyone do that?”
“Search me,” Rutledge admitted. “Must have had a reason, though. Looks like he had a nice line of it here before you guys tracked everywhere.”
“Well, leave some for the forensics team and come over here,” he said. Rutledge muttered something incomprehensible, but she stood up.
“Look around in the drawer,” she said. “See if there’s something else there.”
“Yes, thank you, I know how to do my job,” Gabe growled.
“Touchy, touchy. Here, gimme the note.” Gabe handed her the little orange square, and Rutledge took it over to the window. She held it up near the glass,, under the glow of the lights outside, and squinted her eyes up close to read it. “Gods, this man’s handwriting was shit,” she muttered. “Any luck?”
“Just a bunch of pens so far,” Gabe shrugged. There were about a dozen of them, all of them sporting various company names. Most of them looked like medical offices, though there were others as well. Gabe found a mine and a greenhouse in the mix, as well as a couple of chain hotels.
“Grab some for me,” Rutledge chuckled. “All of my black ones ended up in your evidence locker.”
“You’re joking, right?” Rutledge just chuckled again in reply. Gabe picked up a postcard of the Saint Louis arch, but there was no address or note on the back. There was also an eraser shaped like a little robot that he’d seen in movies as a kid. “There’s nothing here,” Gabe grumbled.
“Nelson,” Rutledge called. Her voice was tight suddenly. “This isn’t ‘Valium, eleven.’”
He opened another drawer. There was an issue of some kind of professional journal on the top of the mess inside. “Hmm?”
“It’s ‘Valier, Illinois,” she said. “It’s a town. It’s… it’s about twenty miles from my hometown. Why would Alderman be writing about Franklin County?”
Gabe paused in his search, looking up. “That’s… unlikely. You know how unlikely that is, right?”
“Th… that’s literally what I’m saying, Nelson!” Rutledge stammered.
“Wait.” Gabe opened the drawer with the pens again. He picked one of them up. Then he picked up another one. He shouldn’t have been able to predict what he found. “Well, that’s not good.”
“What is it?”
Gabe gathered all of the pens that looked interesting. “They’ve got Illinois addresses on them,” he told her, raising the blacklight to shine it at her. “All of them, they’re all from-“
“Put the light down, idiot, I’m by the window!”
Gabe lowered the light, but Rutledge’s eyes dropped suddenly to the windowsill as the beam passed it. “No…” she said quietly. “Aim it back here. Right here.”
It didn’t make sense, but Gabe aimed the beam where she was pointing. Something glinted in the blacklight, drawing him closer to the window even as Rutledge crouched down to look closer at it.
“Holy shit…” Gabe gasped. There it was, stuck in a little part of the window frame that had splintered slightly from age. It shimmered in the ultraviolet light, a light pink the color of cotton candy. “That’s…”
“That’s definitely not a dog hair,” Rutledge whispered, reaching for another plastic baggie.
—————————————————————————————-
The two of them left through a maintenance door, not the front door. Rutledge said that it was the way she had come in. They didn’t speak as they made their way downstairs. Gabe just followed Rutledge. He did notice that she was a lot better at sneaking through the building than he was, peeling a bit of duct tape off of each door latch and sticking it onto the thigh of her jeans. Clearly this was not her first time breaking and entering somewhere.
She turned once they were out, locking the maintenance door behind her with a key. “Why do you have a maintenance key?” Gabe asked.
Rutledge pocketed the keyring, glancing around. There was no one to see them. The greenhouse was between them and anywhere else. It didn’t help, though. Gabe wondered if this building would ever stop making him feel as if he were being watched. “I, uh, hooked up with a janitor a couple of years ago,” she said shakily. “After we were done he said he picked me up because he’d never been with a black girl, so I ripped off his work keys.”
“Creepy,” Gabe said.
Rutledge gave him a smirk that looked about as natural as her eyeliner did. “He got fired for losing them. Served him right for being gross. And I have keys now.”
Before Gabe could say anything in reply, Rutledge was leading the way out from behind the greenhouse. Once they were on the sidewalk, she asked where his car was.
“The gas station on Gay Street,” Gabe told her. She looked up at him quizzically, both hands in her pockets.
“Why?” she asked. “Come on, mine’s just past the dorms.” They turned towards the south, down the nice, well-lit, very visible sidewalk that made Gabe more than a little bit nervous.
“Won’t we be seen out here?” he asked.
“We’re just two people out for a walk,” Rutledge shrugged. She spoke in a tight, clipped tone, like she had when he’d dropped her off at her car before.”You’re the off-duty cop, I’m the scared young woman who’s out alone while there’s a psycho killer on the loose.”
“Walking away from a building where the cameras show two people poking around a crime scene.”
Rutledge scoffed a little. “The cops took the only storage drives those cameras had. Nobody’s had time to order new ones yet. No way.”
“They didn’t have backups?”
“This is Warrensburg.”
“How do you know?”
She frowned up at him with a slightly frustrated air. “I know every camera on campus. Don’t you know the ones in your station?”
Gabe didn’t have an answer for that. He couldn’t think of a reason to know everything about the security cameras. At least, he couldn’t think of a legal reason. They continued along in silence for a couple of blocks. The dorms were mostly silent, well, as silent as the dormitories ever were. There was always some student up listening to music with the window open, or a couple wandering between buildings. There was always someone trying to make their way home, too drunk or high to function. Even at this time of the morning, there were students awake.
Gabe caught himself looking over his shoulder again. Rutledge was right, though, she had to have been right. No one could have seen them, or they would have already been stopped, surely. As he turned his face back forward, though, he caught Rutledge doing the same thing he was. She was breathing too quickly for the pace they set, and he thought he actually saw her jump a little bit when a student somewhere shouted a greeting to a friend.
Rutledge was scared, now. She was well and truly spooked.
“How did you know there would be dog hair?” Gabe decided to ask.
“That wasn’t dog fur,” Tracey said, shaking her head just a bit too quickly. “Dog fur doesn’t show up in blacklight. Least, I don’t think it does.”
“It was fur, though. You said there would be fur.”
“I don’t know what kind of animal that was,” she admitted. “I’m not really a life sciences girl. I dabbled, but I was more into plants. And even an expert would need tools to figure that fur out.”
That wasn’t what Gabe was asking, and he knew that Rutledge knew that. “But how did you-“
“It’s not important!” Rutledge hissed at him. “I’m out. This is your problem now.”
Gabe stopped walking for a short moment. “Well… Good?” he said. Very cool, Officer Skippy, he thought. He had to admit, though, that it was a bit surprising. “Does this mean you’re going to stop playing Nancy Drew and cooperate?”
Rutledge paused. “Who?”
Gabe sighed. “Never mind.”
Rutledge turned right, into the parking lot behind the furthest dormitory. “It means that I’m out,” she said. “Jonas Alderman was a rat bastard, but it’s physically impossible for me to have torn him into hamburger and thrown him all over a room. You won’t be able to convince a jury that I did it.”
“Wait,” Gabe was getting very confused now. “Twenty minutes ago, you wanted to know who did this as much as we did.”
Rutledge whirled on him. “Twenty minutes ago, I didn’t know that Alderman was going to Southern Illinois!” she snarled. “I’ve spent the last eight years working very hard to forget that place ever happened, and if your little murder case is involved with anything from that part of the country I can promise you that nobody in your station is equipped to handle it, okay?”
Gabe’s mouth fell open a little bit. The image of the juvenile record flashed into his head. “You ran away from there, didn’t you?” he asked. “There was an Amber Alert. They said you were kidnapped. You weren’t, were you?”
It was Rutledge’s turn to freeze, now. “How did… Oh my god. Fucking cops, man!”
“Come on, you know the department at least Googled you,” Gabe sighed.
She resumed walking. Gabe could see her Malibu now, nestled between a minivan and a sports car of some kind. “Yes,” she spat out. “Yes, I ran away. I was sixteen, and disappearing off of the face of the earth is not as easy as it sounds. Trust me.”
He caught up with her as she unlocked the passenger side door. “So, what happened, then?” he asked. There were blankets on the front seat, old comforters that looked like they had been through several yard sales before ending up in Rutledge’s car. Gabe picked them up and moved then to the back seat while Tracey circled over to her side. He tucked them in between a toolbox the size of a footlocker and a milk crate full of books.
Rutledge was shaking her head as she joined him. She buckled her seatbelt. “Nah. You don’t get that story.”
“Well, someone’s going to look into it,” Gabe told her. “They’re going to look into everything that’s ever happened to you.”
“And they won’t find jack shit.” Rutledge made for the road, and they were off. “Doesn’t matter anyway.”
Gabe frowned at her. She didn’t so much as glance in his direction. Rutledge’s eyes were fixed on the road as she turned towards the main drag, towards the gas station and his own car. He spoke slowly. “A man is dead, Rutledge.”
“I’m about ninety percent sure that it has nothing to do with my time missing.” There was a small catch to Rutledge’s voice when she said that.
“Uh-huh.”
“Ninety-five,” she shrugged. “Maybe even ninety-seven point twelve percent sure.”
“Why do I not believe you?” Gabe asked.
“Because people ususally don’t,” Rutledge told him.
There was the main road. She paused briefly, but as soon as the stoplight turned green Rutledge was on her way through the town. They passed the edge of campus, the auto repair building on one side of them and a stone tower that was best described as “historical” on the other.
“So what’s in Franklin County that you’re so scared of?” Gabe tried again.
Rutledge’s head moved back and forth a bit in the light, as if she were trying to formulate something resembling an answer for him. In the end, though, the girl just sighed. “It’s complicated. You wouldn’t understand it.”
“Is it… is it a crime thing? Because I’m with the police?”
“Because…” She took a shaky breath, which turned into a small, sad laugh. “Because you’re just a person, Nelson.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gabe asked.
Instead of answering him, Rutledge shifted her car into park. Gabe glanced around, blinking. He hadn’t noticed them arriving at the gas station. His own maroon sedan was right on the other side of the window.
Gabe asked the question again. “What are you talking about?” He spoke more quietly this time, more slowly. She was already spooked, he reminded himself. Something was very wrong here.
Except she had stopped looking frightened, exactly. Rutledge’s expression more closely resembled something Gabe had seen in the military. She was staring at her steering wheel, very intently focusing on nothing at all. “Nelson,” she said. “Hand this off to State, okay?”
“Yeah, we were going to.”
“No!” Rutledge turned now, and brought her eyes up. She still didn’t make eye contact with him though, Gabe noticed. She was watching his chest, just like she had with the Chief at the station. “Hand it off, and stay as far away from it as you can! I’m serious, you can’t be messing around with this shit!”
“Tracey…” Gabe shook his head. “I have to do my job, Rutledge. If there’s trouble in the ‘Burg, it’s my job to deal with it.”
Rutledge gave him an expression somewhere between contempt and pity. Gabe realized that he’d used her first name without thinking. He ignored the small pang of regret as something born more of habit than propriety. “You’re an idiot,” the girl said. “Do you know that?”
Rutledge’s car was gone quickly once Gabe had left it. She didn’t stick around for small talk. Gabe leaned against the rear bumper of his car with his hands in the pockets of his khakis, watching the road that the Malibu had vanished down.
For just a few moments, the oh-so-badass punk that Perkins had been convinced was a murderer had been… different. Gabe had the feeling that he’d just witnessed something almost nobody in Warrensburg had ever seen.
His nose crinkled, though he wasn’t sure exactly why. Something in the night breeze had reached Gabe’s nose, a musty sort of smell that was just barely there and gone again. Gabe’s thoughts drifted towards his own hometown. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to run away from there, it was the safest place in the universe. That’s what hometowns were supposed to be, right? They were the one place you could always run to, not the place you spent years running away from.
His own childhood had been amazing. He’d had a younger sister, and he’d argued with her incessantly, but everyone in town knew that if you tried to mess with one of the Nelson kids you were going to have to deal with both of them. No one ever did, anyway. There had been no bullies in his childhood, at least none that he had ever had to worry about.
He’d even had a dog. She had been this scraggly brown mutt that had looked like every dog did after a few generations of unsupervised breeding, and he’d been so young that he’d just called her “Scruffles.” Gabe didn’t know why, but he suddenly missed that dog. He remembered how she would jump up on his lap after they’d gone swimming together, and how he was always happy to scratch her ears even when she had that horrible smell that dogs always got when they were wet.
There it was, that was the smell in the air. Someone nearby had to have bathed their dog earlier that evening. Gabe shook the memory of Scruffles out of his head and got into his car. It was time for bed. It would be time to get out of bed again in a few hours, actually. He didn’t want to be completely without sleep for his shift tomorrow, did he?
At least he had a couple of days off after this shift. God, but Gabe needed the break.
Rating and content warning: It's a modern dark fantasy, rated R. There will be blood, violence, language, and all the stuff you'd expect from that kind of story. I won't be tagging individual chapters. Use your own judgement here.
Summary:
A small college town is rocked by a horrific murder, with only one suspect. Officer Gabe Nelson knows Tracey Rutledge can’t possibly be guilty, but the only thing more incriminating than the woman’s behavior is everything else that his investigation reveals.
Why does the case trace back to her childhood home, and why did she run away from it eight years ago?
Why is the FBI as interested in Tracey as they are in the murder?
What smells like wet dogs?
As the case closes in on Tracey, so does the real killer. Gabe will have to choose between the life he has always believed in and the values he has always held, while the world he thought was real starts to fall apart.
Chapter List, to be updated weekly:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Coming soon!
If you don't want to wait for weekly updates, or just want to support my work, you can get the text from Chapters 1-12 on Kindle HERE for 2.99 USD. Or you can just read the chapters for free here and enjoy the art, which is also awesome of you!
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact the author.
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
Reblogging this from my new “author” blog. I started publishing my dark modern fantasy novel last week, and you can read it here. Chapters will be released weekly, or you can just go buy 1-12 on Kindle if you follow the link.
hate how all these apocalyptic films show society breaking down the hot minute the grid goes down, with all the survivors banding off into tiny violent gangs that prey on each other.
bitch you are a member of one of the most social species in existence! it is actually insane the extent to which humans have evolved to use cooperation as our main survival tool. humans have been building and then rebuilding societies for as long as disasters have been bringing them down. an apocalypse would be fucking awful, but the survivors would end up building communities and networks and pooling resources and knowledge, because that's what humans do. that's what they DO!!!
This is my biggest argument against most doomsday preppers. We have then everywhere out here, they come down from the mountains like once a year to get lottery tickets and buy underwear from Walmart.
These people think that the minute we don't have a stock market or police or a congress, we're going to descend into apeshit asshattery and start killing each other, so they literally hoard weapons and ammo.
Y'all, these guys can't even purify their own water and they think they are going to survive an apocalypse alone.
The loners are going to die. The preppers are going to die. You wanna know who isn't going to die? The community who strategically builds a safe space which includes food, walls, medical care, and a social structure.
Look, if you want to prep for an apocalypse, that’s your right or whatever. But a lot of them are just doing it wrong. As @gamer-crow noted, a lot of those doomsday folks can’t even purify water. They’re just banking on a Mad Max scenario where no one can stop them from stealing and enslaving everything that catches their eyes.
You want PRACTICAL SKLLS. Learn to sew and garden, how to cook on a campfire, or how to preserve meat and vegetables. Learn carpentry. Auto mechanics. Leatherworking. Learn to make tools so that other people can learn to make what they need. If you must hoard, hoard things like fabric, spices, and tools that can be trade goods later. Make sure your neighbors know what you can do, though maybe not what you’ve got stored away.
Surviving hardship doesn’t take weapons and badassery. It takes creativity, hard work, and community.
In case anyone’s wondering how our move to Madrid is working out, today involved my landlord toting a duffel bag full of chainmaille, plate armor, and a broadsword up to our apartment so he, my husband, and I could all nerd out about historical clothing together. The three of us wound up comparing notes through broken English, terrible Spanish, and Google Translate for an hour.
Landlord: has mad metalworking and leatherworking skills, but no sewing skills and minimal woodworking skills. Needs a gambeson for his chainmaille and wants a wooden horse crest for his plate helmet. Can’t speak English well enough to find tutorials on YouTube.
My husband: has some metalworking skills including several years of making chain maille whne we were in uni, and mad woodworking skills including beginning carving. Has been wanting to learn to make swords for longer than we’ve been married.
Me: Has intermediate sewing skills, mostly in historical clothing and making quilts, is a native English speaker who knows how to find just about any skill set tutorial on YouTube. Has been wanting to experiment with medieval clothing.
I recommend letting the proverbial “freak flag fly” and being as unapologetically weird and nerdy as you can be in public. They will come to you.
This time, I was dealing with a new landlord in a new country and hadn’t worked out how much I wanted him to know about our weird hobbies, because I wasn’t sure how negatively it might impact our ability to live in this apartment. I wasn’t looking for friends, just trying to pay my rent. It ended well, but I’ve had things end badly before, like the time a landlord in Missouri came by unexpectedly and found our Christmas tree with a skull and pirate hat on top instead of an angel or other religious symbol. THAT time, it ended unpleasantly.
But when we’ve just sort of been OPENLY dorks in public, yeah, we’ve had some negative reactions, but it’s how we find each other as well. I actually met my husband by discussing gothic, macabre humor with a chick friend in public, and some skinny weirdo with a leather jacket and exactly ONE friend in the whole world (who was even more insane than he was) paused to add his own freaky weird humor to the joke. We were instantly four best friends, inseparable for about seven years, and after that the skinny weirdo and I have been married for almost fourteen years.
Yeah, you’re gonna get called out by some normies, but whatever. You’re gonna get stares, just bask in them and get more flamboyantly weird in response. One by one, though, you’ll start finding other weird, nerdy people in real life yourself.
You know when a fast angry song comes on that you know every word to and you’re in just the right mood that your eyes light up with the fire and angst of a thousand punk rockers and you just feel so alive
I don’t mind laundry, but DUSTING. It is the most pointless chore ever because it never ends, and if you don’t do it then within a month your house looks like a DnD dungeon.
I’m thinking how at some point Elrond, who definitely saw many Men die during his (immortal) life must have started saying something like “If you meet my brother, give him my love” to them on their deathbeds. And I think it became something of a tradition, something he was actually expected to say and maybe eventually when you had the Rangers of the North leaving Rivendell on some dangerous errand, they would add “I hope we meet again but if we don’t - I’ll be sure to tell Elros…” to their farewells and no one would be sure if that was more heartbreaking or heartwarming
